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How did David Hume explain how complex ideas are formed?

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For the Scottish philosopher David Hume, the human mind does not create ideas from scratch; rather, it derives them from impressions—the vivid data of sensation or internal consciousness.21

Hume explained that complex ideas are formed through the mental operations of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing simple ideas. While simple ideas are direct, faint copies of simple impressions, complex ideas are constructed by combining these simpler units.12

The imagination plays a central role in this process, as it has the capacity to assemble and divide disparate ideas at will. However, this assembly is not entirely random; Hume argued that the production of thoughts is guided by three associative principles:2

Resemblance: The mind tends to connect ideas that share similar qualities.2
Contiguity: The mind associates ideas of things that are near each other in space and time.2
Cause and effect: The mind creates strong associations between ideas of events that are frequently and uniformly experienced together.21

Through these processes, the mind organizes atomic units of experience into the complex concepts that constitute our understanding of the world.23